


Legacy | a study in blue and gold.

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [16]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: 50 Sentences, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, One-sided Edwin, Rush Valley, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:25:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“We should have kids,” says Winry, thoughtfully, and Paninya lowers her mug of coffee. The liquid ripples in tight circles of brown and creamy beige while the train rumbles onwards.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Or, in which Winry and Paninya have kids, explored through fifty themes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacy | a study in blue and gold.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash February. Prompt I5 on my bingo card, "Kidfic". Also written for the "50 Themes" challenge, with an average of two sentences per theme.
> 
> Please note that Paninya is a transwoman while Winry is cis.
> 
> Also, trigger warning for some period-typical homophobia and transphobia, as well as the use of some offensive language. It's not a major part of the fic in any capacity.

_I. Motion_

“We should have kids,” says Winry, thoughtfully, and Paninya lowers her mug of coffee. The liquid ripples in tight circles of brown and creamy beige while the train rumbles onwards.

_II. Cool_

In the grimy restroom at the Central train station, Paninya checks the thick padding of her bra, the stress lines of her compression panties, the looseness of her pants. When she exits she arranges her mask of ease onto her features.

_III. Young_

Winry is nineteen years old; Paninya, twenty-two. Phantom wails haunt her dreams, spin elusive sleep in the tender hours before dawn.

_IV. Last_

Her mother waved from a train platform right as the deadly missile approached. Does history repeat itself?

_V. Wrong_

“I already heard about you wanting kids,” comes Ed’s voice a million kilometres away from Resembool, a distant sadness unbroken by the static, “and if that makes you happy, I’ll do it.”

“Huh?” Paninya hears Winry twice, first downstairs in her real voice and then crackled over the other phone in the house: “No, no, you’ve got it wrong.”

_VI. Gentle_

When they make love that night she is exceedingly soft, as if Winry were fragile, were frail, were spun of gold and stardust. Winry frowns, begs for more, but Paninya is too infinitely aware of the skin between them to come.

_VII. One_

According to Satella it only takes a single time for a man to make a woman pregnant. Paninya bites her tongue: _What about two women?_

_VIII. Thousand_

Winry does not insist. But Paninya hears her sanding the sharp corners of the tabletops, stacking books with names like _What to Expect When You’re Expecting_ and _Baby Blues: The First Six Months_ like religious tomes, writing out daily to-do lists neatly filling an ever thickening binder on the kitchen counter, a thousand whispers of the heart.

_IX. King_

Kneeling over the toilet bowl and convulsing, Winry calls her: _queen of my heart_. Paninya slides down the wall with the requested sprig of ginger in her fist and the bitter taste of terror on her tongue.

_X. Learn_

She is afraid that she doesn’t know how to do this.

_XI. Blur_

She is afraid that she doesn’t have time to learn with Winry’s hands trembling on the white oval, on the twin streaks of blue, on the curse-blessing promise. “The next nine months’ll be over before we know it,” Winry is whispering; fear flattens Paninya to the floor.

But Ed tells her that increased gravity on a particle comparatively increases the speed of the environment, so perhaps Winry speaks the truth.

_XII. Wait_

Nine months.

_XIII. Change_

She doesn’t feel the soft tenderness that her friends describe, watching their wives and girlfriends inflate with new life. She smells the vomit in the kitchen sink and hears the irritation in Winry’s voice and feels the exhaustion pressing into them both.

_XIV. Command_

Her grandmother calls with late-night remedies for swollen feet and throat-searing nausea and aches deep in her spine so fierce Winry cannot sleep. Slinking to the shadows, Paninya takes automail orders, cooks, cleans, hides in the security of orders to follow.

_XV. Hold_

When she embraces Winry, the skin of her lover’s stomach is taut and strained, as though about to burst open, to explode like an overripe fruit.

_XVI. Need_

Shopping list: milk; bread; flour; sugar; egg whites, for Aerugish meringue; basil; white chocolate; pecans, to roast and salt; Ling’s patented Xingese-style smoked fish, prompting the Emperor’s arrival in the middle of a legislative session; Al’s steamed pasta, causing the young alkahetrist to return from Xing; May’s delicious green tea snow-cream, bringing the princess in with the golden boy; General Mustang’s morning-after waffles, bidding the campaigning Fuehrer candidate to leave the trail for a few months; Captain Hawkeye’s morning-after waffles antidote, filling the house temporarily with thinly veiled banter of guns and flame alchemy and being useless when wet; Lan Fan’s leftovers stir fry, relieving given Ling’s presence guaranteeing his vassal’s existence in the crowded house as well; Ed’s pancakes, despite their being burnt and shrivelled-black, because, as he explains to Paninya, he’s never made them before and doesn’t know how.

Paninya knows that what Winry craves does not come on a porcelain dish.

_XVII. Vision_

The man at the grocer’s jeers: “That skank off’n cheated on you and now she got ‘erself knocked up, and you’re still with ‘er. Fuckin’ desperate.” She sees red; he sees her fist in his face and her automail legs covered in a mixture of the contents of his stomach and his veins.

_XVIII. Attention_

“You’re unhappy, aren’t you?” says Winry, and Paninya is startled, and also furious at herself, that her lover has noticed. “It’ll get better, I promise.”

_XIX. Soul_

She can feel himherit kick against her palm; she splays her fingers over Winry’s belly, and Winry offers Paninya a set of picture books: “So that then he’s born, he’ll know your voice right away, just like he knows mine.”

_XX. Picture_

Years later the photographer will snap the shot: Winry, Paninya, Ed, Al, May, Mr Garfiel, along with their children. Then Ed will request a second photograph, with himself holding their son, and although Winry will hesitate, Paninya, watching the tremble in his golden irises, will agree before Ed finishes the voice-cracking question.

_XXI. Fool_

When Winry’s water breaks she cries out and crumples to her knees, and Paninya stands in the doorway, staring at her mother under the wheels of the incessant train. By the time she blinks and sees Winry again, Winry has crawled to the phone to call the hospital.

_XXII. Mad_

The sterility of the hospital with its unyielding white lights and nostril-burning stench disinfectant— _Winry is not a disease to disinfect_ —drives her insane. That or the waiting.

_XXIII. Child_

Her son squeals in her arms and for the first time she thinks: _maybe she can do this_.

_XXIV. Now_

Yesterday Paninya shook at the thought of being a mother— _a mother_ —and tomorrow she will face her first of a thousand sleepless nights. Today she holds her son and her lover in her embrace and she is invincible.

_XXV. Shadow_

“They almost didn’t let me see you,” Paninya remarks on the drive home, her timbre even and level and somehow not drowning in tears while Winry rocks their son asleep, “because I wasn’t your husband and they didn’t believe me when I said _the child’s mother_. Or when I lied and said _your sister_.”

_XXVI. Goodbye_

His name is Theodore and he’s the reason Winry’s stomach has been sliced open and stitched up again with ugly black teeth tearing through her skin. Paninya touches Theo’s little hand to the wound: “Wave bye-bye to your old home, Theo, and welcome to life with your mommies.”

_XXVII. Hide_

Paninya plays peek-a-boo with Theo for an hour before Winry reminds her about the automail orders and dinner and a million shards of reality that bid her check the time. “ _Someone’s_ adjusted,” she jokes, and Paninya kisses her with the heat of a thousand stars.

_XXVIII. Fortune_

Adding and painting the nursery cost a fortune, blue and green and red and gears and spanners and fanciful animals gamboling through a meadow of dreams—Paninya’s skills as an artist far outshining Winry’s stick figure doodles and earning Paninya a wrench to the head—but fortunately Pinako’s moved-in presence speeds up their production of automail twofold. And on laundry days the whites and the colours are actually separated for once.

_XXIX. Safe_

Winry and Theo and Den are scared of thunderstorms. Paninya calms them with hot chocolate and warm milk and scratches behind the ears while Pinako draws the curtains.

_XXX. Ghost_

They don’t talk about her parents.

Expectations flitting in the shadows of her vision, in the quiet of a dreamless night, in the silence between Winry snoozing gently, head resting on Paninya’s arm, and Theo awakening with a fearsome cry for milk and for water and for his mothers, because what _would_ her parents have said?

_XXXI. Book_

The binder thins day by day; the books tear at the corners and wear at the seams. Theo delights in eating three pages of _Breast of the Breast: The Mother’s Guide to Lactation and Milk Formulae_ before anyone locates the source of the tearing noises.

_XXXII. Eye_

As the months wear on his bright blue eyes darken to a deep midnight giving way to brown. Paninya grins endlessly while Winry pretends to pout and Pinako, sighing, undos the stitching on the blanket to replace _blue_ with _brown:_ _Granny’s Favourite Brown-Eyed Boy_ swaddles Theo for months until he outgrows the long end and graduates to _World’s No. 1 Grandson, Theodore Rockbell-LeCoulte_. Winry takes endless photographs to serve as a source of humiliation the instant he’s old enough for friends.

_XXXIII. Never_

Paninya doesn’t let Winry or Theo hear the jeers of the hecklers with their heads so far up their own asses they can’t realise that _two mommies_ can fall in love and have a child, _their_ child. Neither do the patrons of Rockbell Replacements  & Repairs, one of whom almost ends up in jail for breaking the arm of a woman who strolls in expressly for the purpose of insulting the hardworking mechanics who somehow apparently do not live up to her wonderful opinions of the right and the proper ways of life.

Because if Winry hears those jeers, her wrench _will_ their skulls, and her lover _will_ be imprisoned.

_XXXIV. Sing_

When Winry catches Paninya singing Theo to sleep with half-remembered Cretan lullabies from her own childhood, Paninya sputters apologies for half a minute over coffee prior to Winry bursting out into laughter. “Why are you apologising for being _bilingual_ ,” she demands, and Paninya feels the wings of freedom unfurling at her shoulders, “when I want you to teach Theo Cretan _right now_?”

_XXXV. Sudden_

It is rainy, and they go for a drive. They come back to Theo, crying from hunger pangs, and Pinako, still seated perfectly in the chair with the pliers and the automail foot in her hands, as if she’ll stir, as if she’ll awaken in a moment or two to continue fiddling with the appendage of steel, as if she’ll keep loving Winry forever.

_XXXVI. Stop_

It is rainy on the day of the funeral as well, black and grey and white, even Ed shedding his scarlet coat for the sable of mourning. And all Paninya thinks is that sitting in a chair with pliers and automail is so much more _Pinako Rockbell_ than the stiff hands-together and the forced smile and the somber gown and the white rose and the iron coffin can ever be.

_XXXVII. Time_

For six months Winry bustles around the house  crafting automail orders at a record pace and keeping the entire two-story building and workshop entirely spotless. Paninya rocks Theo slowly and waits for the dam behind Winry’s eyes to break.

_XXXVII. Wash_

Paninya can sense Winry’s grief as sharp and real as a heated blade. The day she finally cries the tears come ugly and thick and wet, and she is the most beautiful being Paninya has ever seen.

_XXXIX. Torn_

Winry throws out stashed liquor and the bottles break on the sidewalk outside. Theo cuts his hand on one of the glass shards; Winry stitches up the tear, touches the scar on her abdomen, and asks Paninya how she could have been such a fool.

_XL. History_

On rainy days Winry settles Theo on her lap and spins stories, half-real and half-fantasy, of his grandmother. She isn’t scared of thunderstorms anymore.

_XLI. Power_

Since the pregnancy the powerdrills had been locked in the drawer. Without Pinako’s observant gaze Theo nearly loses a limb twice, and when Ed jokes that at least she’d end up hoisting with a new outlet for her automail obsession, Winry slams the phone down hard enough to crack the receiver.

_XLII. Bother_

By summer’s end the Elric brothers have moved in, Ed writing a massive doorstop on application of the concepts of alchemy to everyday life, Al practising his Xingese with a May weary of the past several years spent dealing with Xingese nobility. “It takes a village to raise a child,” says Winry cheerfully, hugging a Theo terrified of the argument from the next room, “and with the noise we’re making I’m pretty sure we might as well be an entire town!”

_XLIII. God_

Theo tugs on Paninya’s sleeve and stutter-asks who _God_ is. Ed spends the night in the doghouse with Den.

_XLIV. Wall_

Theo manages to stumble-walk between Paninya’s and Winry’s hands. Amid the uproarious cheering of the attending family, May bribes him with an outstretched chocolate bar and Paninya cries foul and Winry takes a million photos.

_XLV. Naked_

“I’m like Mommy, not like Mama?”

Paninya watches Theo’s ‘Mama’ across the table as Winry kneels down to explain the universe in the hopelessly optimistic tone of a woman in love with someone who deserved the world and received the world and then some in form of the most incredible lover in the universe.

_XLVI. Drive_

Each time Paninya pants from the number of automail orders she’s received or groans at the amount of appointments filling up her day or sighs about the lack of sleep or lovemaking their overworked schedules occasionally require, she needs merely glance over at Theo’s smile, brighter than the heavens above and more lethal than the fires below. That, and maybe another cup of coffee.

_XLVII. Harm_

Theo falls sick one evening, his brow feverish for upwards of a week. In those tense seven days Winry and Paninya learn how much the rest of the household cares for the child: so much that the mothers have to play their _he’s our kid_ card for any time taking care of him.

_XLVIII. Precious_

“Like me?” asks Theo.

“Rivers,” his mothers say in tandem, grinning, laughing.

“Love me?” asks Theo.

His mothers hold him between their warm bodies. “Oceans.”

_XLIX. Hunger_

Some mornings Ed, Al, and May take Theo to teach him of the world, of earthworms wriggling after the rain, of Den chasing squirrels into trees, of rainbows unfurling a banner of hope across the sky: Some mornings Paninya and Winry scream out their _I love you_ s in moans of ecstasy.

Others mornings are Winry and Paninya and Theo alone, and the house rumbles with their happiness.

_L. Believe_

Hoisting Winry into the air, hair cascading over her shoulders, Paninya spins her around, draws her into her arms, kisses her as if the world were ending—although it’s only just beginning. “Theo,” laughs Paninya, her voice high and clear as the fresh mountain air, “you ready to be an older brother?”


End file.
